As a boy, Simon Garfield started collecting "errors" - rare stamps flawed by printing faults and absent colours. As an adult his childhood obsession became a full-blown mid-life crisis. This amusing but painfully revealing account of a passion he was once only able to admit to people he could really trust traces his fascination for these tiny print slip-ups from the simple pleasures of boyhood to an attempt to create order out of chaos and finally the gradual decline and break-up of his marriage. A touching testimony to what is, by and large, a peculiarly male emotional displacement, it pulls us into a world of pricey bits of paper and their impact on the lives of those who love them. When Garfield told his marriage counsellor he intended to put his collection on the market, she observed that "the selling of his mistakes" might signify a new start for him. But for a non-sufferer the suspicion lingers that this book is not really a curative piece of self-analysis but yet another symptom of the same "chronic malaise".